Rick Atkinson is at work on volume three of his trilogy about the role of the U.S. military in the liberation of Europe in World War II. He is the best-selling author of The Long Gray Line, a narrative account about West Point’s class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War; and An Army at Dawn, the first volume in the Liberation Trilogy, a narrative history of the American Army in North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe during the Second World War. The Wall Street Journal called it “the best World War II battle narrative since Cornelius Ryan’s classics, The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far.”
His book about the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, In the Company of Soldiers, was published in March 2004. The New York Times Book Review called it “the most intimate, vivid and well-informed account yet published” on that war, and Newsweek cited it as one of the ten best books of 2004. The second volume of the Liberation Trilogy, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, was published in Oct. 2007. The New York Times called it “a triumph of narrative history, elegantly written…and rooted in the sight and sounds of battle.”
Atkinson’s many awards include the the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for history; the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting; and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for public service, awarded to The Washington Post for a series of investigative articles directed and edited by Atkinson on shootings by the District of Columbia police department. He is winner of the 1989 George Polk Award for national reporting and the 2007 Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. Atkinson has served as the Gen. Omar N. Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Army War College, where he remains an adjunct faculty member.
Atkinson served as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and senior editor for 25 years at The Washington Post, where his most recent assignments were covering the 101st Airborne Division—then commanded by Gen. David H. Petraeus—during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and writing about roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. Previously he served as the assistant managing editor for investigations, a position that gave him the responsibility of investigative reporting at the newspaper. Atkinson’s journalism career began at The Pittsburg (Kansas) Morning Sun in 1976; in 1977, he moved to The Kansas City Times, and to The Washington Post in 1983. Among other assignments, he served as the Post’s Berlin bureau chief, covering not only Germany and NATO, but also spending considerable time in Somalia and Bosnia.
Born in Munich, Germany, Atkinson is the son of a U.S. Army officer and grew up on military posts. He holds a master of arts degree in English literature from the University of Chicago. He and his wife, Dr. Jane C. Atkinson, a researcher and clinician at the National Institutes of Health, live in the District of Columbia. They have two grown children.